Many people I know just use text editors, no IDEs at all. Modern text editors, whether text-only (vim, emacs) or graphical (Atom, sublime) have plugins to replicate whatever IDE functionality you want anyway.
I should have worded my question better. I wanted to know whether he works directly on the dev server over a terminal or only connects to it and uses programs (IDEs, text editors) on the client machine to work on the code.
I usually work on a fairly large project (think of building a complete OS for embedded devices). IDE cannot handle that. My editor of choice is vim, combined with ctags, and some custom plugins. Sometimes when starting a new project from scratch, or writing a new tool, I use sublime (or vscode). I have smb server running on my dev-machine, and can use sublime on client machine.
